Chapter 14
SALVATORE
The truck comes through the gate at eleven fifty with Jersey plates and the right paperwork, and I let it.
I'm in Luca's car at the far end of the yard with the lights off, behind a row of reefers that hum. Luca's beside me. Matteo's on the phone in the gate house with Danny, and he's been told to stay there, and he's staying, and I can feel him not liking it from three hundred yards.
"Three," Luca says.
"Three."
Three men. Two in the cab, one on the back.
They come down the row like they've done it before, no hurry, the driver with his window down and a cigarette going, and they stop at the stack I told Danny to give, and the one on the back gets down with a bolt cutter and walks to the box like he's going to his own garage.
Snap.
I hear it from here. Or I don't, and I know it well enough that it's the same thing.
"We could take them," Luca says.
"Yes."
"Three men and a truck. Tommy's crew's four minutes out."
"Yes."
"And then we'd have three men who don't know anything, and a truck, and Moretti'd know we were waiting, and whoever made the call would know we were waiting, and next Sunday the sheet would be clean for six months.
" I watch the doors open. "I'm not spending the man at my table on three guys with a bolt cutter. "
Luca doesn't say anything. He agrees. He'd have said it in the same words if I'd waited.
The one with the cutter waves the truck back. Forklift. They've got a forklift coming, from somewhere in the yard, and that's a fifth man, one of ours, and I say, "Who's that."
Luca's already writing. "Rodriguez. Night shift. Six years."
"Bought or told?"
"Bought. Told would've been Danny."
The forklift comes down the row and lifts the pallets out one at a time, nine hundred thousand dollars of copper wire in eleven minutes, and loads the truck, and the driver flicks his cigarette out the window onto my yard, and the one with the cutter closes the box's doors again, empty, and puts a new seal on it.
A new seal. So in the morning it'll look right until somebody opens it.
That's a nice touch. That's a man who's thought about it.
"Plate," I say.
"Got it."
"Rodriguez goes home tonight and doesn't come back. Not touched. Just gone. Let him wonder."
Rodriguez parks the forklift. He does it neatly, the way a man does a thing he's done ten thousand times, and he climbs down and stands in the white light for a second looking at the box with its new seal on, and then he looks up the row, at the dark where the reefers are, at us.
He can't see us. He looks anyway. Then he walks to the gate house with his hands in his jacket and doesn't hurry, and I think: six years.
Six years of Christmas envelopes and a turkey, and somebody offered him more, and I'd like to know how much, because that's the price of six years, and I've never once asked what it was.
"And the truck?"
"Let it go."
The truck goes. Back down the row, out through the gate, and Danny lifts the barrier for it with his hands shaking so hard I can see it from here, and the tail lights go onto the road and away towards the bridge, and the yard's quiet, and the reefers hum.
"Nine hundred," Luca says.
"I know what it cost."
Danny Kowalski's hands are shaking so hard he can't get the log open, so I take it off him and open it myself.
"Nine forty," he says. "Nine forty tonight. Same voice. He said Tommy again. He said the office again. He had the container number and he had the ship and he wanted the stack, and I said, sure, hang on, and I gave it to him, and I called you like you said, and I."
"You did right."
"I gave him the box."
"You gave him the box I told you to give him. Sit down."
He sits. The gate house is too small for three men and Matteo's standing in the door with the cold coming in past him and his jaw going, and out in the yard under the white lights there's a forty-foot container with its doors open and nothing in it, and it's the fourth, and this one I watched go.
Not watched. Let.
I put the stack sheet on Danny's desk. One sheet. Sunday's. Five boxes on it with a stack number next to each, and one of them's the copper, and the copper's the one he asked for, and the copper's the one that's gone.
"It was on the table Sunday," Matteo says. "Same as always. Five of us."
"Yes."
"So it's one of five."
"It's one of four. I didn't call the gate house."
He looks at me. He's got his mother's look again, and he doesn't know it, and he's using it on me at midnight in a box with a heater, and it's the wrong night for it.
"Say the names," he says.
"No."
"Sal. Say them. Say them out loud so I can hear you say them. Luca. Aldo. Dom." He stops. "Me."
"I know the names."
"Then say the last one."
"You didn't call the gate house, Matteo."
"How do you know."
"Because you're standing in the door asking me to say it, and a man who'd done it would be standing anywhere else."
He doesn't move for a second. Then he lets his breath go, and puts his hand flat on the door frame, and looks out at the box.
"Nine hundred grand," he says. "And you let it go."
"I let it go so I'd know it wasn't the gate. Now I know it wasn't the gate. Now I know it's a man who sits at my table and says grace." I close the log. "That's worth nine hundred."
"Is it worth Dom?"
I don't answer him.
"Because I'll tell you what Dom's going to say.
Dom's going to say it's her. He's going to say four boxes, and a rat's daughter in the house, and count the days.
He's going to say it tomorrow, and the men are going to hear it, and it's going to make sense to them, because it's the kind of thing that makes sense.
" He turns round. "And you can't tell them it's not, because the only way to tell them is to say what you just said to me.
That it's one of four. And you can't say that. "
"No."
"So what do you do."
"I find out which."
"How."
"Quietly."
Matteo laughs. It's not the laugh from the table. It's shorter.
"You're going to be quiet," he says, "and Dom's going to be loud, and you think quiet wins that."
"I think quiet's the only one that doesn't get somebody killed on a guess."
"Somebody's going to get killed anyway, Sal. That's what this is. That's what it's for." He pushes off the door frame. "I'm going to go and stand next to a box I lost. Come and find me when you've decided who to trust."
He goes out into the light.
Luca's in the car. He's had the engine running for an hour and he's got the heat off, because he doesn't feel it, he never has, and I get in and sit and don't say anything until we're through the terminal gate and onto the expressway.
"Four," I say.
"I heard."
"Aldo. Dom. Matteo. You."
"Yes."
"Matteo didn't."
"No."
"You didn't."
He drives. He takes a long time with it. "You don't know that," he says.
"I know it."
"You know it the way you knew the Camry, till you didn't. I'm saying it because somebody has to.
I've had that sheet in my hand every Sunday for two years.
I've got a Tommy. I could've made that call from the gym in the time it takes to tie a glove, and you'd never.
" He changes lanes. "So you don't know. You believe.
That's different. Be clear about which one you're doing, because in a week you'll have to do it about your uncle, and you'll want to know how it felt the first time. "
I look out the window. The Island at one in the morning, wet, orange under the lights, nobody on it.
"Then I believe," I say.
"Good. So do I."
"The car."
"Gone. Since Friday. I've had a man on every place it's been, and it's not been.
" He glances at me. "Friday night you went up those stairs over the Anchor, and by Friday night that car was off the Island.
That's an hour, Sal. Less. Whoever's running it heard what you did to Donato inside an hour and pulled back.
That's not a man watching from a car. That's a man who gets a phone call. "
"From who."
"From somebody who knew where you'd gone."
"Tommy knew. Benny. You."
"Rosa," he says. "Marina. Whoever the brother's talking to. Whoever Donato called with his good hand before he passed out."
I don't say anything.
"I'm not saying it's any of them. I'm saying you told two people you were going to Rosebank and it was known in an hour, and a week ago somebody on the Island knew which box was copper. I'm saying the walls of that house are thinner than you think."
We come off at Todt Hill. He doesn't say anything else. At the gate Vito lifts a hand and the gate goes, and the drive goes up under the trees, and the house is dark except for one light.
The study.
"You left that on," Luca says.
"No."
He stops the car. He looks at the window, and at me, and he doesn't fold his hands, because he's driving, but he does the thing with his face that's the same as folding them.
"Then someone's in your chair," he says.
She is.
She's in my father's chair behind my father's desk with her feet up on the seat under her and a cardigan of Rosa's round her shoulders, and the lamp on, and the tank humming behind her head, and she's not reading and she's not on her phone.
She's sitting there. She's been sitting there for hours.
It's in her shoulders, the same as on the bed on Sunday, and she looks up when I open the door and doesn't move.
I shut the door.
"You're in my chair."
"It's a chair."
"It's my chair."
"I've been in here before. You didn't mind then."
"You were standing then."
She looks at the desk. At the gate logs, and the drawer on the left that I didn't shut all the way on Sunday night, and the photograph of Gia Silvestri face down by the lamp where I put it and haven't touched since. She's seen it. I can tell she's seen it. She doesn't say so.
"You smell like the docks," she says.
"I've been at the docks."
"Was it bad."
"Yes."
"Do you want to tell me."
"No."
She nods. It's the nod from the night I locked her down.
Filing. But it's not the same, because she's in the chair, and she stays in it, and she pulls Rosa's cardigan tighter and looks at me across my own desk in the lamp light with her hair down and her feet under her, and I've been awake for twenty hours and lost nine hundred thousand dollars and been told my walls are thin, and none of it's in the room.
"I went home today," she says.
"I know."
"Benny told you."
"Benny tells me where. Not what."
"My brother's lying to me." She says it to the desk.
"He's got a second phone and a clean apartment and steady hands, and he told me the car was nothing, and I sat there and let him, because I couldn't pick it up.
Him. I couldn't pick him up." She looks at me.
"That's never happened. Not once. Not when he was eight and not when he broke his wrist and not when he came into the bar with his face like that.
I always pick him up. And today I sat on the couch and I thought, I don't have to.
There's a house. There's a man in a car downstairs who'll take me back to it. And I got up and I left him there."
"Good."
"It's not good. It's the worst thing I've ever done."
"It's the first thing you've ever done for yourself. That's not the same as worst."
She looks at me for a long moment. Then she puts her feet down on the floor, and stands, and comes round the desk, and stops in front of me, close, closer than the bed, with the cardigan slipping off one shoulder, and she's looking up at me, and her hands are at her sides, and they're still. Not held still. Still.
"I've decided," she says.
"Decided what."
"Lock the door."